Over at the InternetStormCenter they have been reporting a spike of port 53 traffic lately. I know port 53 is for DNS traffic but it doesn't *have* to be and virtually every firewall is going to let the traffic pass. Things that make you go Hmmmm.
Another: Wrong! Please let's confine this to a discussion rather than a slap fest.
That accountablity should be part of the service agreement, not the fact that you wrote the software. So, who is providing the support services if not the company that develops the product? If it is the developing company then it should be listed as part of the quote. Thereby brining the costs into alignment.
I mean, if charging lots of money means you will jump when the customer said "jump", then why isn't Micorsoft look like a jack-hammer going up and down very, very fast I am no Microsoft fan, but I will admit that they do provide a very good support mechanism. They have one of the best support/KnowledgeBase websites going (I have used MS, RedHat, SuSE, McAfee, IBM, Compaq, Cisco as well as others). Their fee-based phone support for corporate products is staffed with very smart people who know their products(in my limited experience). Besides I'm pretty certan that you can get in touch with MS support personell ANY time.
If you pay someone a large sum of money for *anything* then you expect them to be at your beck and call to help you fix it when something goes awry. When a system (software, hardware, process) that a company relies on goes down they want it fixed and fixed fast. They want someone they can get on the phone and get a fix from pronto.
Companies are paying for uptime, and assurances (contractual or implied) against downtime.
I wholeheartedly agree that Open Source products are getting far easier to install and to admin. But the simple fact that Open Source products are built on the ideal that an Admin wants a secure, reliable, efficent system precludes the administrative methodology MS uses of, put the CD in the drive and press the "continue" button until the "Press OK to reboot" message comes up. After reboot, poof you have new server software.
The simple desire to run an effective server will drive you to read the docs just so you understand the underlying concepts of what your server is doing.
That's odd because I have seen people with NO hands on server experience install NT4 on a server and set up some shares and away they go. This box is COMPLETELY insecure and likely to be rooted by the first high school kid the company hires but none the less they got it up and running with NO server level experience.
Setting up an Exchange server can be installed and configured(albeit badly) by a person with NO email server admin experience.
I am not saying that the servers in these scenarios will work efficiently but they will have been set up and made to run with NO documentation.
Can you honestly say that in your "decade" in the industry you have never seen a person with little to no server experience set up an NT box running major services without documentation?
Can you honestly say that in your "decade" in the industry you have ever seen a person with with little to no server experience set up a UNIX box running major services without documentation?
p.s. As to my "regurgitation of unsupported MS claims" I am assuming you want the MS and UNIX servers running at equal (or as close as the MS servers can get) levels of security, efficiency, stability. I never said ANYTHING that even implied that level of required support. I only said you can make many MS products run without cracking the docs.
MS products are designed to function with as little user / administrator intervention as posible. Open Source products typically can not be installed / configured / operated unless you have dug into at least some documentation. I would think that O'reilly being one of the major suppliers of commercial Open Source documentation would benefit enormously from a paradigm shift to Open Source products by the government.
So yes, their MS publications would take a revenue hit but their Open Source publications would have a far greater revenue increase.
Not to mention that many people committed to the MS way probably buy their training / support materials from MS Press.
Re:What will they think of next?
on
Gyroscopic Mouse
·
· Score: 1
I started my career as a bench tech at a Tandy Computer Service Center. My boss kept some interesting equipment around. We had a 5MB hard drive that had its own case, internal PSU, controller, etc... The thing was the size of a modern mini-tower and had a price tag of $5000 when it was new! Imagine a mere $1000 a Meg. and the RS computer centers couldn't keep them in stock.
Re:What will they think of next?
on
Gyroscopic Mouse
·
· Score: 1
I usually only move the mouse back to the center of my mousepad. seeing that this relies on gyroscopes for midair motion I'm thinking you won't be using the mousepad. However, if you bump into the wall, I suppose you could hold the gyromouse REALLY REALLY still while you walk back to the center of the room;-)
oops Hit the enter key instead of the tab... oh well. Anyway, If you are about to get married I thought you would have known by now. It's not about what you want. Go ahead and mock me but most everyone I know that IS married will agree. Ones that have only "been dating a really long time" will argue with me till they're blue in the face... Untill they have been married for a couple years.
If when buying a PS2,or any system you agree by EULA or any other means not to modify/disassemble/compile the system then you are bound by the agreement you made. If by buying a PS2 (which I haven't so I don't know) you agree no to develop without a license then you are bound by that. Otherwise Sony can go piss up a rope. When you use some WAREZ means to fire up a program that you did not legally procure the right to use then that is a different matter. The article said that sony liked the ruling not that they were the plaintiff. It sounds like this guy was busted for pirated games rather that the mod chips. FWIW, the established system in the us is that Congress passes laws and the courts rule on the validity of those laws. Therefore it is the duty of Americans to take the laws that they don't like to the judiciary for review. Congress is duty bound to create the laws according to the passing fancy of their constituancy. Its a good and valid system but there is no room for the complacent.
Mod chips for the PS2 allow hobbyists to develop their own works on the system for private use. There is no morally acceptable use for a hacked cable box. Its only use is to steal service.
I believe that I should be able to Hack a Tivo and I should be able to sell a copy of Windows after I'm done using it and I should be able to quote a book(as long as the quote is not so excessive that I'm actually just taking a significant sum of their work). However, Just because I believe it should be so does not make it so. For example I don't think you should have to stay for the duration of a red light at 3:00 in the morning when there are no vehicles or pedestrians around to wait for. But by obtaining my drivers' license I agree to be bound by the traffic laws, ALL of them, not just the ones I like. So when the cop pulls me over at 3:00 in the morning, my excuse about not liking the law is immaterial. Now, tell me something. What do you think of an entity(person or company) that freely agrees to some terms of use and then blatantly disregards them at their convenience? When I grew up I was taught that you played by the rules of the game or you didn't play that game, it was your choice.
I understand and agree with you that to run a *current software set* you need to do it as a whole system. Keep in mind however that next November when MS ceases support for Win95 and WinNT, any users (corporate or otherwise) will be forced to choose between a wholesale upgrade of their Operating System and many of its applications (especially considering that MS will not sell them licenses for Win2K but rather they will have to leapfrog over it to XP) or accept the fact that NO patches will be written for security vulnerabilities, programming errors or any other reason. With Linux you can succesfully choose to run a 0.9x kernel if your programming skills are sufficient or you are willing to pay someone to write the necessary changes. As it is, even now, MS is no longer writing service packs for NT. Imagine if you had a system that was doing everything you wanted it too yet you had to pay for new licenses for your O.S. and many of your applications, go through the testing required for new software, writing new training materials, training the users and actually upgrading all of the involved systems. Just because new flaws will occasionaly be exposed and you have no way to compensate. I still maintain that MS forces upgrades and Linux does not. Also, I too love Linux but this topic goes beyond those feelings and reaches into the ability of a person being allowed to run their system as they choose to.
I'm sure that is what Red Hat would like but I'm also sure they know how well its worked in the past. How many of you remember when Apple filled classrooms with free computers/software back in the 80's. Everyone I know was taught to program in AppleBasic and LOGO, and we're so hooked on Apple that... Look, MS stands to kill the school budgets in 5 years with licensing fees. RH can only hope that MAYBE some of the kids that use RH at school will like it enough to use it later on. And unlike MS if the kids do get good at using the software, they are LESS likely to find themselves 1.) Forced into upgrades 2.) Paying huge licensing fees 3.) locked into using ANY particular companies products (software or hardware). I say good for Red Hat, it's pretty rare that buisness gets a chance to do good works without making shareholders nervous.
It is the ISP's job to make sure that their subscribers boxes & bandwidth are not being attacked by another host on their network if the detrimental factors are clearly defineable and relatively easy to control. It's a QoS issue. If I pay for a service that they are selling then they are obligated to provide it. Besides all of that, Taco is right. The internet is a public area and the ISP's are doing their part to keep public spaces available for all to use.
bitch piss moan You better not use this to take advantage of me
gripe bitch whine Oh no, the guy I didn't want for President gets war time powers during war time
What I do not hear:
Members of congress here is a way to realize Civil Liberties AND the protection of world citizens
Mr President I wish to help, here are some possible solutions to the problem
I'm sorry people but if we are only going to bitch about what our government officials do and never give them workable ideas and solutions then shame on us.
And remember as Abraham Lincoln told us, we have a "government OF the people, BY the people FOR the people"
that statement requires your active partitcipation not just you criticisms.
I have been an admin for 3 years. All of my professional time is spent on NT 4.0. I am using/learning Linux at home. Before my time as an admin I was a Network Tech and before that I was a Bench Tech for 3 years. I know that Windows is *now* a, stick in the CD and walk away for a half hour, process. BUT, I also remember spending up to a day taking a customers PC (formerly having MS-DOS 4.1) and scrubbing the HD and installing Win 3.1. After that ensued HOURS of tweaking.INI files, pulling beta Windows 3.1 drivers off of FTP sites using MSD and other tools to find out what IRQ'a DMA's, I/O Ports, etc.. were in use. Why was I doing all of this you ask? Because Windows had a VERY limited list of drivers. Almost nothing of any use came on the Windows floppies. Sometimes the OEM of the CD-ROM drive(Pre-IDE days) or sound card or video adapter or scanner interface card or whatever would have the Windows 3.1 driver, but just as many times you would have to call customer service and MAYBE they had an FTP site. probably though they didn't even know what FTP was and they would have to send you (by postal mail) a driver for their hardware to work under Windows 3.1. After getting the driver installed it never worked the first time through. You had to tweak config files and hardware settings and the Windows control panel was a trial of patience. So what am I saying? The only reason that you can "stick in the CD and walk away for a half hour" is because the OEMs write all of these drivers and give them to Microsoft to put into their OS and they make damn well sure that Microsoft has any and all interface specs they need to ensure that the API's that Microsoft develops work with their hardware. So if/when the OEMs decide that Linux is worth some action the driver issue will evaporate. Just like it did for Windows. Also as it said here, most of the things that you mention a Windows user being able to do are undesirable (at least on my network).
The base functionality has already been field tested by Rodney Brooks and crew during the Days if the MIT Mobot lab. Dr. Brooks developed and designed all of the "sensory" functionality they need into Hannibal, Attilla and a few others. Hell, strap a jet-pack onto Hannibal and let him go baby!! Even the A.I. won't be terribly difficult (though not trivial of course). It would be just a few more layers added into the subsumption architecture to provide the ability to filter and react to the data. I think the biggest stumbling block is the speech recognition and the fault tollerance needed to enact it to the point where it is "safe". So close to it but yet a few years off at least.
Actually from the look of the simulation and knowing that the terran system is on the edge of the galaxy, it looks like *we* will be leaving after the third inning or so. Really what's the point of staying? It's all rigged anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
Three words:
embrace and extend
If you want new policies shaped to your liking you have to be at the table to make it happen...
Over at the InternetStormCenter they have been reporting a spike of port 53 traffic lately. I know port 53 is for DNS traffic but it doesn't *have* to be and virtually every firewall is going to let the traffic pass. Things that make you go Hmmmm.
Easy now Mr. Stallman. Everyone's entitled to their opinion ;-)
Another: Wrong!
Please let's confine this to a discussion rather than a slap fest.
That accountablity should be part of the service agreement, not the fact that you wrote the software.
So, who is providing the support services if not the company that develops the product? If it is the developing company then it should be listed as part of the quote. Thereby brining the costs into alignment.
I mean, if charging lots of money means you will jump when the customer said "jump", then why isn't Micorsoft look like a jack-hammer going up and down very, very fast
I am no Microsoft fan, but I will admit that they do provide a very good support mechanism. They have one of the best support/KnowledgeBase websites going (I have used MS, RedHat, SuSE, McAfee, IBM, Compaq, Cisco as well as others). Their fee-based phone support for corporate products is staffed with very smart people who know their products(in my limited experience). Besides I'm pretty certan that you can get in touch with MS support personell ANY time.
Accountability.
If you pay someone a large sum of money for *anything* then you expect them to be at your beck and call to help you fix it when something goes awry. When a system (software, hardware, process) that a company relies on goes down they want it fixed and fixed fast. They want someone they can get on the phone and get a fix from pronto.
Companies are paying for uptime, and assurances (contractual or implied) against downtime.
I wholeheartedly agree that Open Source products are getting far easier to install and to admin. But the simple fact that Open Source products are built on the ideal that an Admin wants a secure, reliable, efficent system precludes the administrative methodology MS uses of, put the CD in the drive and press the "continue" button until the "Press OK to reboot" message comes up. After reboot, poof you have new server software.
The simple desire to run an effective server will drive you to read the docs just so you understand the underlying concepts of what your server is doing.
That's odd because I have seen people with NO hands on server experience install NT4 on a server and set up some shares and away they go. This box is COMPLETELY insecure and likely to be rooted by the first high school kid the company hires but none the less they got it up and running with NO server level experience.
Setting up an Exchange server can be installed and configured(albeit badly) by a person with NO email server admin experience.
I am not saying that the servers in these scenarios will work efficiently but they will have been set up and made to run with NO documentation.
Can you honestly say that in your "decade" in the industry you have never seen a person with little to no server experience set up an NT box running major services without documentation?
Can you honestly say that in your "decade" in the industry you have ever seen a person with with little to no server experience set up a UNIX box running major services without documentation?
p.s. As to my "regurgitation of unsupported MS claims" I am assuming you want the MS and UNIX servers running at equal (or as close as the MS servers can get) levels of security, efficiency, stability. I never said ANYTHING that even implied that level of required support. I only said you can make many MS products run without cracking the docs.
MS products are designed to function with as little user / administrator intervention as posible. Open Source products typically can not be installed / configured / operated unless you have dug into at least some documentation. I would think that O'reilly being one of the major suppliers of commercial Open Source documentation would benefit enormously from a paradigm shift to Open Source products by the government.
So yes, their MS publications would take a revenue hit but their Open Source publications would have a far greater revenue increase.
Not to mention that many people committed to the MS way probably buy their training / support materials from MS Press.
I started my career as a bench tech at a Tandy Computer Service Center. My boss kept some interesting equipment around. We had a 5MB hard drive that had its own case, internal PSU, controller, etc... The thing was the size of a modern mini-tower and had a price tag of $5000 when it was new! Imagine a mere $1000 a Meg. and the RS computer centers couldn't keep them in stock.
Yeah, and the 3 1/2 inch drives too!
I usually only move the mouse back to the center of my mousepad. seeing that this relies on gyroscopes for midair motion I'm thinking you won't be using the mousepad. ;-)
However, if you bump into the wall, I suppose you could hold the gyromouse REALLY REALLY still while you walk back to the center of the room
oops Hit the enter key instead of the tab... oh well.
Anyway, If you are about to get married I thought you would have known by now.
It's not about what you want.
Go ahead and mock me but most everyone I know that IS married will agree. Ones that have only "been dating a really long time" will argue with me till they're blue in the face... Untill they have been married for a couple years.
Most excellent sig. I like it.
Do the terms of service for your account allow you to view the extended channels on another set without renting an additional box from your provider?
If when buying a PS2,or any system you agree by EULA or any other means not to modify/disassemble/compile the system then you are bound by the agreement you made. If by buying a PS2 (which I haven't so I don't know) you agree no to develop without a license then you are bound by that. Otherwise Sony can go piss up a rope. When you use some WAREZ means to fire up a program that you did not legally procure the right to use then that is a different matter. The article said that sony liked the ruling not that they were the plaintiff. It sounds like this guy was busted for pirated games rather that the mod chips. FWIW, the established system in the us is that Congress passes laws and the courts rule on the validity of those laws. Therefore it is the duty of Americans to take the laws that they don't like to the judiciary for review. Congress is duty bound to create the laws according to the passing fancy of their constituancy. Its a good and valid system but there is no room for the complacent.
Mod chips for the PS2 allow hobbyists to develop their own works on the system for private use. There is no morally acceptable use for a hacked cable box. Its only use is to steal service.
I believe that I should be able to Hack a Tivo and I should be able to sell a copy of Windows after I'm done using it and I should be able to quote a book(as long as the quote is not so excessive that I'm actually just taking a significant sum of their work). However, Just because I believe it should be so does not make it so. For example I don't think you should have to stay for the duration of a red light at 3:00 in the morning when there are no vehicles or pedestrians around to wait for. But by obtaining my drivers' license I agree to be bound by the traffic laws, ALL of them, not just the ones I like. So when the cop pulls me over at 3:00 in the morning, my excuse about not liking the law is immaterial. Now, tell me something. What do you think of an entity(person or company) that freely agrees to some terms of use and then blatantly disregards them at their convenience? When I grew up I was taught that you played by the rules of the game or you didn't play that game, it was your choice.
I understand and agree with you that to run a *current software set* you need to do it as a whole system. Keep in mind however that next November when MS ceases support for Win95 and WinNT, any users (corporate or otherwise) will be forced to choose between a wholesale upgrade of their Operating System and many of its applications (especially considering that MS will not sell them licenses for Win2K but rather they will have to leapfrog over it to XP) or accept the fact that NO patches will be written for security vulnerabilities, programming errors or any other reason. With Linux you can succesfully choose to run a 0.9x kernel if your programming skills are sufficient or you are willing to pay someone to write the necessary changes. As it is, even now, MS is no longer writing service packs for NT. Imagine if you had a system that was doing everything you wanted it too yet you had to pay for new licenses for your O.S. and many of your applications, go through the testing required for new software, writing new training materials, training the users and actually upgrading all of the involved systems. Just because new flaws will occasionaly be exposed and you have no way to compensate. I still maintain that MS forces upgrades and Linux does not. Also, I too love Linux but this topic goes beyond those feelings and reaches into the ability of a person being allowed to run their system as they choose to.
I'm sure that is what Red Hat would like but I'm also sure they know how well its worked in the past. How many of you remember when Apple filled classrooms with free computers/software back in the 80's. Everyone I know was taught to program in AppleBasic and LOGO, and we're so hooked on Apple that... Look, MS stands to kill the school budgets in 5 years with licensing fees. RH can only hope that MAYBE some of the kids that use RH at school will like it enough to use it later on. And unlike MS if the kids do get good at using the software, they are LESS likely to find themselves 1.) Forced into upgrades 2.) Paying huge licensing fees 3.) locked into using ANY particular companies products (software or hardware). I say good for Red Hat, it's pretty rare that buisness gets a chance to do good works without making shareholders nervous.
It is the ISP's job to make sure that their subscribers boxes & bandwidth are not being attacked by another host on their network if the detrimental factors are clearly defineable and relatively easy to control. It's a QoS issue. If I pay for a service that they are selling then they are obligated to provide it. Besides all of that, Taco is right. The internet is a public area and the ISP's are doing their part to keep public spaces available for all to use.
This is what I hear:
piss moan whine Don't take away my freedom
bitch piss moan You better not use this to take advantage of me
gripe bitch whine Oh no, the guy I didn't want for President gets war time powers during war time
What I do not hear:
Members of congress here is a way to realize Civil Liberties AND the protection of world citizens
Mr President I wish to help, here are some possible solutions to the problem
I'm sorry people but if we are only going to bitch about what our government officials do and never give them workable ideas and solutions then shame on us.
And remember as Abraham Lincoln told us, we have a "government OF the people, BY the people FOR the people"
that statement requires your active partitcipation not just you criticisms.
I have been an admin for 3 years. All of my professional time is spent on NT 4.0. I am using/learning Linux at home. Before my time as an admin I was a Network Tech and before that I was a Bench Tech for 3 years. I know that Windows is *now* a, stick in the CD and walk away for a half hour, process. BUT, I also remember spending up to a day taking a customers PC (formerly having MS-DOS 4.1) and scrubbing the HD and installing Win 3.1. After that ensued HOURS of tweaking .INI files, pulling beta Windows 3.1 drivers off of FTP sites using MSD and other tools to find out what IRQ'a DMA's, I/O Ports, etc.. were in use. Why was I doing all of this you ask? Because Windows had a VERY limited list of drivers. Almost nothing of any use came on the Windows floppies. Sometimes the OEM of the CD-ROM drive(Pre-IDE days) or sound card or video adapter or scanner interface card or whatever would have the Windows 3.1 driver, but just as many times you would have to call customer service and MAYBE they had an FTP site. probably though they didn't even know what FTP was and they would have to send you (by postal mail) a driver for their hardware to work under Windows 3.1. After getting the driver installed it never worked the first time through. You had to tweak config files and hardware settings and the Windows control panel was a trial of patience. So what am I saying? The only reason that you can "stick in the CD and walk away for a half hour" is because the OEMs write all of these drivers and give them to Microsoft to put into their OS and they make damn well sure that Microsoft has any and all interface specs they need to ensure that the API's that Microsoft develops work with their hardware. So if/when the OEMs decide that Linux is worth some action the driver issue will evaporate. Just like it did for Windows. Also as it said here, most of the things that you mention a Windows user being able to do are undesirable (at least on my network).
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Damnit!!! There goes your record...
The base functionality has already been field tested by Rodney Brooks and crew during the Days if the MIT Mobot lab. Dr. Brooks developed and designed all of the "sensory" functionality they need into Hannibal, Attilla and a few others. Hell, strap a jet-pack onto Hannibal and let him go baby!! Even the A.I. won't be terribly difficult (though not trivial of course). It would be just a few more layers added into the subsumption architecture to provide the ability to filter and react to the data. I think the biggest stumbling block is the speech recognition and the fault tollerance needed to enact it to the point where it is "safe". So close to it but yet a few years off at least.
Actually from the look of the simulation and knowing that the terran system is on the edge of the galaxy, it looks like *we* will be leaving after the third inning or so. Really what's the point of staying? It's all rigged anyhow.